


an angel came down

by openended



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Tree, Community: sj_everyday, F/M, Healing, Snowball Fight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 15:55:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/297542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first Christmas after her father dies is rough.  The second Christmas after her father dies is better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	an angel came down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nymaeria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nymaeria/gifts).



> For the 2011 sj_everyday Secret Santa, for nymaeria who wanted _ideally some angst with ultimately a happy resolution (basically UST to RST :)_. This is probably not the angst you were looking for, but I hope it satisfies. Happy Holidays!

The first Christmas after her father dies is rough. She’s supposed to go to San Diego, but her flight is delayed and then cancelled, which is okay since she can’t actually get to the airport thanks to the blizzard dumping eight inches of snow an hour over Colorado Springs.

She ends up at Jack’s house. Daniel dragged her there the night before her flight for a team Christmas, but they’re now all stuck until the snow stops.

She makes it through Christmas Eve with the assistance of a lot of alcohol; except for Teal’c, they’re all drinking an enormous amount of booze. It starts as a drinking game with the Christmas special marathons on TV ( _one drink if you’ve seen this movie more than twice, two drinks if more than three times; chug if you can recite the next four lines_ ) and devolves after dinner into a general need to get plastered. The past year has been difficult for everyone, and all four of them are thrilled to see it end: Jack’s promotion off the team, Anubis, Daniel’s death and subsequent resurrection, Replicarter, Teal’c’s son’s wedding, Jacob’s death.

Daniel asks about the rumor of Jack being transferred to Washington.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Jack says with a sense of finality and takes a sip of his scotch.

Sam takes a large gulp of her vodka and cranberry juice that, at this point, is really mostly vodka.

* * *

There’s a surprising lack of hangovers the next morning. The snow’s still coming down like crazy and Sam spends a ridiculous amount of time staring at the Weather Channel while on the phone with Delta, trying to reschedule her flight; she ends up yelling at a customer service representative based in Florida trying to argue that, according to the radar, there’s no reason tomorrow _isn’t_ a valid time for the airline to start running flights out of Colorado Springs again. She hangs up before lunch without solving anything and calls her brother to wish everyone a Merry (snowy) Christmas.

Jack’s making grilled cheese for lunch, but he doesn’t miss the way she holds herself when she comes back into the kitchen after finishing the phone call. Teal’c touches her shoulder and, for a moment, Jack thinks she’s actually going to break right in front of them. But she takes a deep breath and visibly pulls herself together and assures Teal’c that she’s okay.

“Can I do anything to help?”

Jack knows a plea for distraction when he hears it. “Cheese, grater,” he points, “go.”

She throws him a mock salute, intended to make him laugh, but she swallows when she sees the way he looks at her. He doesn’t believe her for a minute.

They brave the snow to walk as a team to the grocery store two miles from Jack’s house. Daniel throws the first snowball, hitting Jack square in the shoulder. Sam and Teal’c stand aside and watch two grown men throw snow at each other in the middle of the street before silently deciding to team up against the two of them.

Jack’s snowball catches Sam right in the back of her neck and it explodes, sending a shower of snow down her jacket. She turns to face him, glaring while the icy cold makes its way into her sweatshirt, but he looks so genuinely apologetic that she can’t stay angry at him for more than ten seconds. Jack smiles at her while Daniel and Teal’c fight over a lump that they think is a parked car.

Sam bites her lip, suddenly reminded of a similar snowball fight she had with her family as a kid – before her mom died and before her dad worked too much and her brother got angry all the time and she spent every waking hour studying. Jack puts his arm around her shoulders and forces her to move from her spot in the street.

“One foot in front of the other,” he whispers.

After two and a half blocks, she doesn’t need to remember _left, right, left, right_ anymore.

The shelves are mostly empty, picked clean by people who plan ahead for snowstorms and they haven’t been restocked since. But they find enough to make sandwiches and there’s one carton of eggs left and Sam picks up a bag of lettuce and some carrots so they can approximate a vegetable. Jack adds beer to the cart because hard alcohol two nights in a row is not a good idea for anyone and Daniel and Sam aren’t as fond of Guinness as he is. When Teal’c remarks on the weather and surprise that they’re even open, the cashier tells him that she’s on the cross-country skiing team at the high school.

* * *

Sam excuses herself after dinner to lie down, claiming a headache none of the guys quite believe. She finds a box of National Geographics from the 1980s buried underneath the bed and distracts herself by reading about countries that no longer exist and scientific and natural discoveries she’s known about for decades. After a few hours, the others decide that it’s bedtime. The wind picks up outside as she hears first Daniel and then Teal’c pass the guest room to use the bathroom and get ready for bed; there’s discussion about who gets the air mattress tonight and then there’s a subtle knock on the door.

“Come in,” she says quietly and sits up. It’s Jack, silhouetted by the living room lamp. She knows he’s here to make sure she hasn’t gone completely off the deep end.

He shuts the door behind him as the lamp turns off – Daniel having come to the conclusion that it’s not worth arguing with Teal’c and to just take the air mattress already – and sits beside her on the bed. Her hand shakes as she reaches out to turn off the light.

She bows her head and starts to cry.

Jack slides his arm around her waist, letting her guide how much she needs him. She ends up resting her head on his shoulder while she cries in the dark.

She isn’t one of those people who asks for what she needs, but Jack’s known her long enough to know what the vacant expression in her blue eyes really means when she lifts her head to look at him. He unties and toes off his shoes and lies down beside her. With a shaky breath, she turns to face him and tucks her head underneath his chin. Jack pulls the covers up before putting his arms around her.

“Thank you,” Sam whispers. It’s nearly lost in the howling wind beating against the window.

Jack kisses the top of her head. “Always,” he whispers back as she falls into a fitful sleep.

When she wakes up, it’s December 26th and she declares an official end to this holiday season. She celebrates by shoveling his driveway. By the time she’s done, another inch has fallen.

* * *

The second Christmas after her father dies is better. Strange, but better. Jack’s in Washington and Cam’s all gung-ho about everything and the Ori are becoming a bigger problem by the hour.

But she decides, a week and a half before Christmas, that this year she’s going to care about the holiday. Cam discovers her plan and tries to talk her into going the whole nine yards about it.

“You can’t have Christmas decorations without garland,” he argues while they’re in line for lunch.

Sam looks at him sideways, eyebrows raised and furrowed at the same time in a look of complete disbelief. “Yes I can,” she says and orders mashed potatoes, no gravy. She spent a few Christmases with his family while they were at the Academy together, and she remembers a brightly-lit, warm house smelling of cinnamon and apples and cocoa, filled to the brim with decorations both old and new. His mother had taken an inordinate amount of pleasure in showing off the popsicle stick ornaments he’d made for her when he was six.

“I can also do Christmas without the real tree, the candles in the window, the lights on the trees outside, wreath on the door, Santa Claus figures on the mantle, full set of light-up reindeer on the roof,” she continues listing off every decoration she’s ever seen at his house until they reach the end of the line and she finishes with, “stuffed anthropomorphic penguin wearing a festive scarf and matching hat.” She fills up a glass with water from the soda fountain machine, grabs a bowl of blue jello (smiling at the dessert cook; he keeps blue jello stocked all year just for her), and takes a seat at their regular table.

Cam slides his tray onto the table and flops into a chair opposite her. “I thought you said you were going to care about Christmas.” He knows, from an eggnog-fueled night during their junior year, that Sam’s mother was the parent who spread the Christmas cheer around, not her father. He’d heard about how awful last year’s Christmas was, so as long as she’s smiling, he isn’t going to question her motivations.

“I am,” she says and spears an overcooked green bean. She lifts her fork and stares skeptically at the limp vegetable. She hadn’t asked for it, but it had ended up on her tray anyway. She’s not sure whether to blame Cam – who’s always on her case to eat better – or the vegetarian line cook masquerading as a server while waiting for a batch of fried chicken to finish. After a test bite determines that the bean is as exactly as pathetic as it looks, she drops it back to her plate and decides to start with a roll instead. “But I have to do this my way, Cam.”

Cam leans back in his chair, confused but resigned to the fact that he’s not going to be able to pawn off the truly hideous wreath his mother sent him onto Sam. Maybe Teal’c will take it. Cam would never be able to look his mother in the eye the next time he goes home if he dropped it in the trash or it remained in a box on top of his refrigerator.

* * *

Contrary to what new recruits believe, most days at the SGC are uneventful. Offworld gate activations are scheduled and on time, nobody tries to blow up the base on a weekly basis, and true threats of world domination are few and far between and almost always predictable. The most exciting thing to happen that day is SG-5 returning from their mission completely stoned on something leafy and local.

They leave together at a reasonable hour. Daniel waves off their invitation for dinner, too buried in Ancient tablets to remember to ingest anything but coffee on a regular basis, and Teal’c is running drills with the newest batch of lieutenants and captains assigned to the base. Winter arrived for good a week ago, dropping six inches of snow that have yet to melt, and flurries dance through the frosty air.

“Please tell me you got video,” Cam begs, as Sam tells him about watching Doctor Barnes, the PhD astrobiologist assigned to SG-5, examine each individual strand of a bright pink koosh ball.

Sam simply smirks and Cam knows that the video will be up on the SGC’s internal website tomorrow morning, if only for a few hours before Landry demands that it be taken down on account of not being “official base business.”

“Is he coming home?” Cam asks once they’re out of hearing range of anyone else.

Sam shrugs. Cam’s one of the few people who knows about her and Jack; she hadn’t been able to _not_ tell him. They’ve been friends for what feels like forever. Cam had just _known_ that something was up when she came back from Area 51, something more than an incredibly awful year; he'd known that she hadn’t left the SGC just to spend more time with Cassie or get away from the hectic life of an offworld schedule for a while. He told her to call Jack that first week she was back in Colorado, to screw the rules and stop putting her life on hold because a line in the regulations said she had to. “He’s going to try,” she says, “though he has meetings the morning of Christmas Eve.”

“Damn,” Cam mutters, kicking a clump of ice and snow fallen from a car. It explodes against his foot. “Whether Atlantis gets carrots can’t wait two days?”

Sam laughs and blinks away the snowflakes caught in her eyelashes. The meetings are far more important than carrots, though sometimes it feels like they’re all menial. But in a line of work where the world really might end if a piece of paperwork sits unfinished or a signature is missing, neither one of them have been able to find true fault with it.

“You want to grab dinner?” It’s late enough that they’ve missed the rush and won’t have to wait.

“Nah,” Sam says, unlocking her car. She tilts her head at the light dusting of snow on her windshield and determines that her wipers and rear defroster can take care of it more efficiently than a brush. “I’m gonna go get a tree.”

Cam nods and taps his palm on the trunk of her car, leaving a handprint of melted snow. “See you tomorrow.”

* * *

The tree stays in its box for a week. She’s needed on base for some emergency about an Ancient device that beeps unnervingly, which evolves into a crisis with an offworld team and a malfunctioning gate, which transforms into a lockdown thanks to an alien bunny rabbit that hopped through on the heels of SG-15. It’s the afternoon of Christmas Eve when they finally catch the damn thing and send it home with fingers crossed that it didn’t find anything to breed with.

When she pulls up to her house, there’s four inches of fresh snow on her sidewalk, marred by the mailman’s footprints to her porch and back, three boxes by the door and a stack of mail that requires two trips to get inside.

“Merry Christmas,” she mutters to nobody. She plugs in the white lights she’s strung up around her porch and suddenly her house doesn’t look so Grinch-like compared to her neighbors. It still needs some work, but she’ll plan better next year. Maybe invest in something cheerful to hang on the front door, as long as it doesn’t jingle.

Before they all left to go home and shower in an actual shower and sleep in their own beds, the whole team made plans to get together tomorrow. Daniel promised to pick up Teal’c and Cam promised to get to Sam’s house early – but not too early – to cook, and Sam’s promised to decorate and have enough booze for everyone. With beer and wine in the fridge, and a Tupperware full of chili defrosting on the counter, Sam cracks her neck and sits down at the table to start wrapping presents.

The radio’s tuned to a station playing exclusively instrumental Christmas music and she begins to hum along with “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” as she methodically cuts and tapes the shiny wrapping paper around boxes for her friends. Jack’s has been wrapped for weeks, a framed picture of the two of them offworld she’d found in Daniel’s computer archives while trying to make his system run faster, but she doubts she’ll be able to give it to him on Christmas. She gets miserable cell phone reception in the mountain, but he knows that and would’ve called her lab phone. She hasn’t heard from him in a week and a half, except for a few emails exchanged while the base was on lockdown. Their schedules are so hectic that it’s only when they hit the two week mark of no phone calls that they start to worry.

Presents wrapped, she takes the lid off the chili and pokes at it. Still frozen solid. At this rate, she’ll end up with crackers for dinner. She exhales sharply and turns to face the tree, still in its box, propped up in the corner of her living room. It’s pre-lit with white lights, but she’s bought several strands of blue to mix in with the white for some variety.

After glaring at the chili to defrost faster, she flips on the lights in her living room and sits down with the tree.

* * *

Sam’s never hung lights on a tree before in her life, and it shows. She thinks she’s finally figured out the pattern and method after the third attempt and she starts from the top, standing on a stepladder to reach the highest branches.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” she says in frustration when her doorbell rings. The strands of lights are looped around her shoulders and arms and she thinks they’re probably tangled around the stepladder’s legs and there’s no way she’s getting out of this mess of blue lights with any measure of grace.

“It’s open!” she shouts, after squinting to determine that the front door is indeed unlocked. She’s pretty sure it’s Cam dropping off ingredients for tomorrow and to surreptitiously ensure that she’s made good on her promise to decorate. She hopes he hasn’t brought the wreath with him; when Teal’c refused it, Cam started offering people money to take it off his hands. Sam’s positive that Wendy sent it to him as a joke: the woman has much better taste than that. She slides the strand of lights over a branch and hisses; her hands and arms are going to look like she was attacked by a wild animal by the time she’s done.

“That’s a good look on you, Carter.”

Sam jumps at the unexpected voice and manages to hold onto her balance. She blinks rapidly at the blue and white lights in front of her eyes and turns. “Jack? What are you doing here?”

He drops his duffle bag on the floor and walks toward her, setting the plastic bag of takeout on the coffee table. “Merry Christmas,” he grins. The smile he receives is well worth the ire of several politicians, his assistant, and the man who took his Chinese takeout order from a staticky airplane phone.

Sam makes a move to step off the ladder, but the strand of lights around her shoulders tightens and she realizes that if she steps down now, she’ll take the tree with her. “Help,” she says, a bit sheepish that, as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force who’s singlehandedly blown up a sun, she’s stymied by a strand of Christmas lights.

Jack chuckles and helps untangle her from the cord. Once she’s on solid ground and no longer glowing blue, he cups her cheeks and pulls her in for a kiss.

Sam loops her arms around his neck as his tongue slides against her lips. She _hmm_ s happily and loses track of time as they kiss next to a half-lit tree in the dying sunlight.

Jack breaks the kiss and holds her close, like it’s been six months since he last held her in his arms, not six weeks. He rests his chin on the top of her head; it’s only when she’s in just her socks and he’s wearing shoes that they’re just the right height for this.

Taking a deep breath, Sam closes her eyes and lets herself be surrounded by Jack. She doesn’t know when he had a chance to change out of his uniform, but she’s thankful: his shirt is soft against her cheek, unlike the scratchy fabric of his dress jacket. His hands are warm on her back and underneath the faint scent of airplane is his aftershave and the generic soap he uses; she keeps a bar in her own shower for days when she misses him a little too much. She feels his lips brush against her forehead and she smiles and tilts her head upward for another kiss.

“You know only the top half’s blue, right?” Jack’s only just now giving her tree the once-over.

Sam blinks. “You want to go back to Washington so I can finish the rest of it?”

Jack hears the smirk in her voice though she’s doing her best to look stoic and completely serious. She can’t hold the expression for long and a smile breaks across her face, lighting up her eyes.

Last year’s Christmas seems only like a fading bad dream.


End file.
